Читать книгу The Female of the Species - Lionel Shriver - Страница 11

These scenes have their satisfactions, but they cost you. In Toroto, everyone paid for this one. Something had gone wrong; the script was awry. No one was happy. No one got what he wanted. Errol decided this is what it was like:

Corgie had “bedwarmers” almost every night. He laughed a lot then. He was loud. Gray lay on the other side of the partition trying to keep her breathing slow and audibly even. Yet the more asleep she sounded, the more Corgie rocked the frame of his bed. When he reached his pitch Gray even tried snoring. Finally neither of them slept well, or woke jaunty.

More than ever, they threw themselves into their separate projects. They drew up separate crews. The tribe was split tacitly down the middle, like troop divisions.

The tower got higher. Corgie liked to climb to the top at sunset very far away from everything.

Corgie had another worship service and Gray didn’t come. He hadn’t invited her. He came back and said it went wonderfully, though Il-Ororen seemed sodden enough afterward and didn’t fix much food; they mostly got drunk.

The rains made everything worse. Gray would record interviews, with irritation helping his cause with the miracle of her machine. Corgie would lope in long, hapless laps through the expanse of his gymnasium. But it was the tendency of the rainy-day mind to stay home. Gray would lie about in her corner craving a book to read, but in lieu of that, starting to write her own. This was no relief, though, as she wrote about Il-Ororen, and she was beginning to despise them—they all seemed just like Charles Corgie. For distraction she made herself a deck of cards from the stiff dividers in her notebooks. Refusing to play with Charles, though, Gray was left with solitaire. She hated solitaire. Gray tried drawing next, but she didn’t draw very well, and disliked doing anything she did badly. She wanted to hear music. She wanted to read a newspaper. She wanted to have a conversation.

Instead, they gave each other directions, edicts; they informed each other of passing incidents with great economy of language, as if every word were being telegraphed overseas.

Charles cleaned his guns. He worked on a new model. For several days Gray wouldn’t ask what the model was of. Yet the severe angular structure, with its jagged points and narrow corridors and tiny rooms with no doors, did not shape into anything recognizable. Finally Gray came up to Corgie in the midst of a torrential, desperately endless afternoon and asked, “What is that?”

“A monument.”

“To what?”

“To whom.”

“You decided the tower wasn’t pointless enough?”

“I’ve passed beyond functionalism,” said Charles mildly, “to pure form.”

“Pure something,” Gray muttered.

“What’s that?” asked Charles nicely.

“Is that just a monument?” asked Gray. “Or your gravestone?”

Charles turned to her squarely. “Now, why do you care?”

Gray turned away. “It’s a boring afternoon,” she said flatly. “It’s raining. It was something to say.” Gray wandered back to her corner and pulled the curtain tightly shut.

During the rainy season Il-Ororen worked in clay, for it dried evenly in the moist air. Out of raving boredom rather than anthropological duty, Gray made water jugs on rainy afternoons. To satisfy her own sense of irony, Gray fashioned Grecian urns with Apollos and Zeuses curling from the handles and sending fire and lightning bolts down the sides of the bowls. The women were delighted, and fouled Gray’s already limping study of their traditional vessel forms by immediately copying hers—one more eager betrayal of their fusty Masai inheritance. It didn’t matter whether Gray’s innovations were better so long as they were new. They imitated urns and Chinese vases and squat British teapots indiscriminately, though they did not make tea. Gray had never read of any African tribe so taken with modernity.

The kraal where Gray potted belonged to Elya’s family, once, before Corgie, the richest and most powerful in the tribe. The father had been the chieftain before Corgie arrived; Charles had shot him early on. Yet the remaining wives did not seem to hate Il-Corgie, and took Gray into their homes with deference but no anger. Corgie’s murder of their husband seemed to make sense to them. Unlike most of the Masai tribe, Il-Ororen had no problem with killing, as long as it worked to your advantage and you got away with it. The wives clearly admired Corgie for felling such an imposing man as their husband, and spoke of the scene of his death not with grief but with awe.

The sons, however, kept their distance. The oldest, Odinaye, regarded Gray with suspicion when she came to the hut. Even for a Masai he was tall and grave. His eyes smoldered before the fire while she built her vases. He would stare silently at Gray for hours through the smoky haze between them. Gray couldn’t shake the feeling that he was waiting for her to make a mistake. She would sometimes try to make conversation with Odinaye, but he never responded with anything but even keener scrutiny.

Gray began to notice Odinaye in her vicinity too often. She would look down from the porch when she was eating lunch and find him staring up at her with steady, unblinking accusation. She would lose her appetite, and go inside.

With Odinaye so often a few paces away, Gray found it increasingly difficult to slip off into the bush alone to attend to her all too mortal toilet. When she and Corgie had their dry, cryptic tiffs in the middle of the compound, Gray would turn and find Odinaye watching from the sidelines. Gray found herself talking more softly; though they were using English, she had the eerie sensation of being overheard.

“I’m being followed,” Gray finally told Charles. “By Odinaye. I dream about him now. He’s there every time I turn around.”

“Maybe he’s in love,” said Charles.

“This is serious.”

“Isn’t everything serious lately?”

“What should I do?”

“Why come to me? You’ve got a problem. So take care of it.”

It was an ordinary afternoon. Gray was struggling with a large water jug. She’d gotten the clay too wet; the sides were collapsing. Odinaye’s presence on the other side of the hut, crouching and staring as usual, was especially irritating. She couldn’t help suspecting—was it only the play of smoke between them?—that there was a wisp of a smile on his face today. She was sure he could see she was having trouble—well, any idiot could see that; the thing was falling apart.

Gray decided to take advantage of her role as the leader of the avant-garde and cave in the sides intentionally. She composed her expression. When one side fell in again, she looked down at it archly and revised a dent here and there, as if that was exactly what the goddess of modern pottery had in mind. Imperiously, she told Odinaye to give her the wooden paddle beside him; she would bat in the other side, too.

“Here it is,” said Odinaye, handing her the paddle readily.

Gray accepted the paddle before she went white. Now that he was closer, his small grim smile was unmistakable.

The daring of the avant-garde potter left Gray entirely. Awkwardly she used the paddle to bat the collapsed side back out again. Using props inside the jar, she secured the sides and quickly put it aside to dry out. When she dipped her hands in a pot of water to rinse off the clay, she noticed they were shaking. Not saying another word, she ducked out the doorway and went straight to Charles Corgie.

“What’s going on?” asked Charles, leaning on his bed with a cigarette as Gray paced the room. “Why can’t you sit still?”

“Would you stop worrying about the way I move for once and listen to me?” Gray whispered.

“I’ll listen if you talk loudly enough for me to hear you—”

“Shsh! Talk more quietly.”

“WHY?” Charles boomed.

“Shut up!”

Charles rolled his eyes. “Shoot.”

“I was working on a pot that wasn’t going very well—”

“So your pot didn’t come out pretty and now you’re mad?”

Gray looked at him; there must have been something in her face to make him sit up without quite the same sultry boredom and put out his cigarette.

“Odinaye was there, naturally,” she went on in a low voice. “I said, ‘Hand me that paddle,’ and he picked it up and said, ‘Here it is.’”

Charles waited. Gray didn’t go on. “And?”

“That’s it.”

“Some story,” said Charles.

“Yes,” said Gray. “It is.”

“I guess it’s one of those subtle narratives that depends on texture.”

“Charles,” said Gray. “He said ‘Here it is’ in English.”

Corgie sat up. “No.”

“Yes.”

Corgie stood and paced. “Well,” he reasoned, taking out another cigarette, “one phrase. Big deal.”

“No, he knows at least two, Charles. I made a mistake. I asked for the paddle in English, too. And I didn’t point. He knew the word ‘paddle.’”

“So? Here it is. Paddle. So?”

“How do we know how many other words he’s picked up, Charles? What else has he heard?”

Charles grunted. He smoked fast, as if his cigarette were hard work to get over with. “Damn it.” He paced some more. “Jesus, we’re gonna have to be careful.” He was speaking more softly now himself.

Gray sighed. “He obviously figured out the language by watching us interact.”

“When have we been doing that?”

“We do still fight sometimes.”

Charles sunk into a chair. “So—what? We’re going to talk even less than we’ve been doing? I don’t even know if that’s possible.”

“Do you know any other languages? French, German, Latin?”

“Nope. But you do, of course.”

“That wouldn’t do any good if you don’t know them, too.”

“Why not? We could have our own separate languages. You could walk around speaking German. I can definitely see it, Kaiser.”

“Well, say. How’s your English vocabulary?”

“Me? The poor uneducated architect? All I know is damn, fuck, and shit. Jane-loves-Puff. Go-Timmy-go. You know that.”

“Stop it. We have to work on this. I mean, we have to—cogitate on our—contretemps.”

“Say what?”

“Odinaye may have learned go-Timmy-go. But he hasn’t learned perambulate-Timmy-perambulate.”

“Let me get this straight. When I hit my thumb with a hammer, I’m supposed to yell, ‘Oh, coitus!’?”

“Exactly.”

“This is going to be disgusting, Kaiser.”

“Or fun. As long as we can’t be heard we can drop it, but if we have to talk to each other in public we should only palaver, parley, or discourse.”

“Or lately, harangue, wrangle, or contend.”

Gray laughed as Charles leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “Maybe their learning English is all for the best,” said Gray softly. “Maybe they’ll finally appreciate that your invocation is a Wrigley’s spearmint-gum commercial.” With a rare moment of affection, Gray reached out with a wistful smile and tousled his hair.

The plan seemed to work to a degree. When Gray and Charles were in earshot of Odinaye, they switched to their most professorial language, and Gray could tell by the light panic with which Odinaye’s eyes followed the conversation that he was no longer picking much up.

The whole vocabulary scam might have issued in an era of reconciliation, but Gray’s lexicon was considerably larger than Corgie’s. When she used a word he didn’t know, he would furiously stalk off in the middle of her definition. To her credit, Gray wasn’t trying to impress him but simply to use an effective scramble on their broken code. To her these multisyllabic marathons were an entertainment, like crossword puzzles.

Charles had his eye on another sport they could share, though; he waited impatiently toward the end of the season for a few dry days in a row. Finally the rain did let up for a week, and the ground was hard enough for Corgie to introduce Gray to the pleasures of his tennis court.

Charles claimed to have played an excellent game back in New York before he was drafted, and told Gray it was tennis he missed more than any other element of Western civilization. After setting a full work crew to refurbishing his court, he walked Gray proudly around its hard-packed clay. He’d had the crew lay down the sacred white lines with ash and string up the heavy hemp net the women of the tribe had woven. He showed her two rackets—laminated strips, soaked and bent and bound at the bottom with a leather grip. Carved at their throats were antelopes on one, lions on the other. They’d been strung with wet gut; as the gut dried it tightened, so the tension on the strings was surprisingly high. The rackets were a little heavy, but lovingly made, and beautiful.

Corgie’s most controversial achievements were his tennis balls. He’d scrounged rubber out of the carcass of his plane and bound it with hide. They were, Gray conceded, miraculously spherical, but the bounce was another matter. “But they do bounce,” said Corgie, taking his ball back from her ungrateful hands. “You try to make a tennis ball.”

Corgie led Gray happily to his court, swishing the air with his racket, the lions at its throat in a position of yowling victory. Charles stretched out before the game with large animal glee, like a predator who’s been cooped up in his lair too long and is ready for a hunting spree.

Il-Ororen gathered around the court with enthusiasm, and Gray called Corgie’s attention to Odinaye’s presence in the front row. “Heed your vernacular.”

Charles snorted and went to his side. He didn’t know the word “vernacular.”

“I attempted to—instruct this—population,” said Corgie after a couple of rather handsome warm-up serves, “on this—pastime. They didn’t—comprehend it. Every—primitive I—inculcated—played a lob game.” He went on quickly, irritated with the vocabathon. “I like a good hard rally, Kaiser. This counts.”

When she tried to return his serve, it thudded into the net.

“You ever—indulge yourself in this—diversion before, Kaiser?”

“Once or twice,” said Gray. That was all she said for the rest of their play.

On Corgie’s second point he double-faulted, but on the third Gray socked the ball into the net again; Corgie looked archly sympathetic, though he should have noticed that she’d nearly gotten the ball across this time. “It takes time to—accustom yourself to the—facilities,” said Charles. “First game’s practice.”

Gray did win one point in their practice game, and Corgie was elaborately congratulatory. Compliments can be far more insulting than criticism; she hadn’t won on a very good shot. Still, Gray gathered her lips together and said nothing.

Later, Corgie no doubt regretted his concession on the first game as practice, for Gray “accustomed herself to the facilities” quite readily. And Gray didn’t play a lob game.

Corgie stopped making conversation. He lay into the ball with his full weight, but consistently started driving it into the net. His eyes blackened; his stroke got more desperate; his game plummeted. In fact, the whole set was over in short order. Corgie strode with steely control past Gray, his grip on his racket tight and sweaty. The lions at its throat were whining.

“You don’t desire to consummate the entire match?” asked Gray.

“No, I do not desire to consummate the entire match,” Corgie mimicked her through his teeth. “You didn’t tell me you were some kind of all-Africa tennis champion.”

“You didn’t inquire.”

Charles started to walk away, and Gray called after him, “Il-Cor-gie!” He turned. “Would you have preferred that I feign a fraudulent ineptitude?” Gray was exasperated with having to talk this way; the words themselves made him angry.

“I don’t need your condescension,” said Corgie.

“And I don’t need yours.”

Corgie waved his hand and shook his head. “This is pointless,” he said, and walked away.

It was pointless. Gray had just wiped the court with Charles Corgie and she couldn’t understand why she didn’t feel victorious. She looked down at the antelopes on her racket. They looked back up at her with their antlers at a sheepish angle and their soft wooden eyes forlorn.

I can’t find my tape recorder,” Gray told Corgie in the cabin the next afternoon.

“You mean you lost it?”

“No, I know where I left it. It’s not there anymore.”

“Someone took it?”

“If you didn’t—I think so.” Gray felt a funny sense of trepidation.

Charles reached for his gun.

“Charles—”

“Then we’re going to find it. They have never taken anything from here before. We’re going to nip this sport in the bud.” He checked that the gun was loaded. “You think that asshole who knows the word ‘paddle’ knows the word ‘tape recorder,’ too?”

“Odinaye is a natural suspect.”

“Good. We’ll see if he knows the words ‘Hand it over’ and ‘Say your prayers.’”

“Charles, it’s only a tape recorder.”

“When there’s only one of them and it makes you a god, there’s no such thing as only a tape recorder.”

Gray followed Corgie warily down the ladder.

When they got to Odinaye’s hut, sure enough they could hear from outside the snap of buttons and the whir of reels; snatches, too, of native conversation about funeral rites. “How appropriate,” Corgie muttered as he ducked inside.

In the corner was a dark figure huddled over the machine. Corgie dragged the man outside by his arm and threw him down. In the light, though, the figure turned out to be Odinaye’s younger brother Login, who was only fourteen. Login crumpled at Corgie’s feet, with his face to the ground. The only sound the boy made was a high, raspy breath, which hit eerie harmonics. Corgie took the safety off his rifle.

The wives, including Login’s mother, quickly gathered around the scene, not daring to interfere. They said nothing. Gray turned and found, with no surprise, Odinaye, tall and silent and glowering ten feet away.

“Okay, you son-of-a-bitch.” Corgie addressed Odinaye in English. “You know those words, mister? You should. Son-of-a-bitch. Now you listening to me? I don’t know for a fact that you took it, so I’m not going to shoot you. But you’re going to watch.”

“Charles—”

“Go get the recorder.”

Gray retrieved the machine. Charles announced in Il-Ororen to the crowd that Login had stolen the sacred voice box. Then he picked the boy up and propped him against the wall of the hut.

Gray put her hand on Corgie’s shoulder. “Charles, we’ve got it back now—”

Corgie brushed her hand off and, with astonishingly little ceremony for a god, took the rifle to his shoulder and shot the thief against the wall, right in the heart.

The shot echoed back and forth between the cliffs of the valley, but died quickly; so did Login. Corgie slung his gun back over his shoulder and left Il-Ororen behind him blithely, the way he might walk away from one of his models with the dark clay figures posed in their attitudes of worship or chagrin. With one glance at Odinaye, who looked back at her with a stiff, unfazed resolve that seemed oddly familiar, Gray trailed after Charles, carrying the hallowed tape recorder. That’s right. That look, it was Corgie’s.

When Gray walked into the cabin Corgie had his back to her and was looking out the window. “Go ahead,” he said shortly, not turning around. “I’m ready.”

Gray stood staring at Corgie’s back, watching those broad shoulders heave up and down from the kind of breathing he might do before battle. For a time she said nothing. She wasn’t ready. She hadn’t rallied the disgust she would need now. It must have been disturbing to enter a room with a man whose gun was still warm, with a dead fourteen-year-old down below, and not feel sufficient revulsion. Gray was shaken, but right now her deepest wish was to sink her fingers into the bands of his neck and relax the muscles, to rearrange his frayed black hair. Gray must have been asking herself what Errol had always wondered, too: how could she overlook that Charles Corgie murdered people? Maybe she wasn’t a “warm, gooey-hearted darling,” but she had her limits and one of them had always been shooting a young boy at five paces. No, she didn’t go for that. How could she go for that in Corgie? Was she actually attracted to a man who shot fourteen-year-olds for stealing tape recorders? Did that impress her? Or did she understand that he didn’t know what he was doing? That Charles’s vision was narrowed enough that for him firing at natives was no different from shooting down ducks at a county fair? Could she forgive that poor eyesight? Yet even if people are born a certain way and end up a certain way for reasons out of their control, aren’t there actions you hold them accountable for, regardless? Wouldn’t Charles be convicted posthaste at Nuremberg? Or would Gray Kaiser be the one stolid juror who would vote to let him off the hook?

Errol had never answered these questions to his satisfaction.

It was with reluctance, then, that Gray began now, though there was one long moment when she actually considered keeping quiet and massaging his neck; in that same moment she also understood that he was tired and upset and would have let her. Instead, she said for the second time, still from across the room, “Charles. It was only a tape recorder.”

Corgie sighed at the window. His body slumped, as if he could feel the fingers withdrawing from his neck. So it was this again. They were both good soldiers, but there were days—Gray, why can’t we shut up? It was hard enough to shoot that boy. Why can’t we drop it? But instead he said, “What was I supposed to do, Gray? Slap his hand and send him to his room? Or sit him down and ask him, If everybody did that, what kind of world would we live in?” He turned around. “Gray darling, we’re not in school anymore. We’re in the middle of Africa. Keeping up this immortality stuff isn’t just a game.”

“It is in a way,” said Gray. “You set the rules. Didn’t you choose to be immortal?”

“That’s right, to save my ass. I saved it, I have to keep saving it. Haven’t we been through this?” Their talk was still without heat. The argument was tired. “In Toroto religion is a matter of life and death. It is for me. So it is for them. It’s only fair.”

“All of which fails to explain why you had to shoot a fourteen-year-old boy—”

“All of which does explain it!” Corgie at last took a few steps toward her, at last gave his voice some edge, some pitch. “I swear, Kaiser, you just don’t want to understand, do you? You just have to be against me. Have to be on the other side.”

“Of this, yes.”

“Of everything and you know it. Kaiser, the irony of this whole business is that I have never met a woman more like me in my life. Lady, you surpass me! I mean it! You bitch all the time, but you took to divinity like a fish to water!”

Gray’s chin rose a little higher. The idea of massaging this man’s neck was now out of the question. “I have done here,” she said coldly, “what I had to do. For my work and for my own survival.”

“Which is what I said, but it doesn’t wash when I say it.”

“I haven’t killed people.”

“You haven’t had to! I do it for you! Why do you think they’re afraid of you, Kaiser? Why do you think you’re still alive? Why do you think nobody’s stolen your lousy tape recorder before now? Darling, you’ve cashed in. Your ticket was already paid for.”

Gray shut her mouth.

“But come on, Kaiser. It hasn’t been so bad, has it? Ordering guys around? Being revered?”

“Actually,” said Gray, “I’ve found it quite uncomfortable.”

“You’re so full of shit!” shouted Corgie. Gray took a step back. For all the reluctance with which this argument began, it was in full swing now; she’d never seen Corgie so angry. “You eat it up, don’t you think I can see that? Oh, you’re nicer than I am, I’ll give you that, but that’s because having them worship you isn’t enough, is it? You have to get them to like you, too. You want them to worship and adore you. At least I have the humility to let them hate me as long as they bring me my supper every night.”

Their voices were carrying. Outside, the sky started to rumble; after a moment it poured. “Convenient,” said Gray. “The gods are fighting. Venting their wrath on Il-Ororen.”

“If there is a real one,” said Corgie, “He’s on our side. We’ve been lucky. You are dangerous. You may have a good time playing Jesus Christ, but I’ve never met more of a human being in my life.”

“That should be a compliment, but it doesn’t sound like one.”

“Oh, cut the humanism shit, will you? For a minute? I mean the reason you’re dangerous is that you’re so jealous. And that’s one big giveaway. That’s the most mortal emotion I know.”

“Jealous of what?” asked Gray incredulously, raising her voice over the rain.

“You can’t stand it that I got here first, can you? You can’t stand not having this whole shebang to yourself, can you?”

“That is—” Gray turned red. “That is the most ridiculous accusation I have ever heard—”

“Miss Gray Kaiser, valiant, beloved anthropologist—everyone goes to you, bows down, asks for advice, but Miss Kaiser doesn’t need anyone, no—”

“You mean I don’t need you.”

The two of them stood face to face. Perhaps they were gods now, at this moment, and this was omnipotence: to know exactly how little they cared. Glaring at each other silently, both Gray and Charles recited together their real credo: Who cares about you, or anyone? Who needs you, or anyone? I blink and you disappear. I turn my back on you and all I see is the door that I can walk out of, always. I am tall and smart and powerful without you. I can make jokes and laugh, and then they are funny. I can write down thoughts and read them back and nod, and then they are wise. I put my hands over my ears and hum, and the things you say that so upset me could be birdcalls or the radio or a fly. You think I want you, and sometimes even I think that, but you are wrong and that is weakness in me, for I am stronger than even I know. I am a god. I am making it rain now. So if I want you to evaporate like a shallow puddle in the bright heat of my brain, then you will shimmer in this room and dissolve into the heavy air and I will not care—I will be thinking about what I would like for dinner; I will be thinking about my important work; I will sleep well at night and get up the next morning deciding what I want to wear. Goodbye, Charles Corgie; goodbye, Gray Kaiser. Only someone outside of us will be able to remember we were ever standing in the same room, that we ever laughed at the same jokes. Since no one else was there, no one will remember that we ever held each other on that bed and kissed and ran our fingers through each other’s hair.

Perhaps at the end of their litany both Gray and Charles looked around the room in confusion, wondering, To whom am I talking, anyway? I must be talking to myself. So, since there was no one else in the cabin, Gray did not need to excuse herself, but turned on her heel and walked out the door. It must have been disconcerting for a woman who could control the weather to step into a torrent and immediately be drenched to the skin.

Charles turned away and went back to building his model. Yet had Charles watched Gray a moment longer he would have seen her fall from grace most literally. Her foot slipped at the top of the ladder to pitch her ten feet through the air to the thick black mud below.

As she lay spitting mud out of her mouth, Gray was sure that her left arm had never been in precisely this position in its life. She thought, Get up, but for some reason she did not get up. All that rose were her eyes, and as she took them up from the ground, they met a pair of long, muddy, patient feet, and, at the top, other eyes, with great frightening whites and too much intelligence. Gray found herself thinking rather irrelevantly that Africans were lucky to have waterproof hair. As strands dripped into her face, she wished hers would bead like that, with smart gleaming droplets crowning her head. For the goddess was looking poorly; Odinaye, princely and serene.

“I help you?” asked Odinaye in English, extending his hand.

Gray didn’t take it. She felt suddenly as if the arm under her chest were a filthy secret she should keep to herself and protect. “I’ll be fine,” said Gray, pointedly in Il-Ororen. “Even a god must rest sometimes.”

“Kaiser,” he said, like Charles. “No rest in ground.” There was that gleam in his eyes again, that slight smile at his mouth, as he grasped her right arm and started to pull her up. When Gray gasped on her knees he let go. It had been a small, dry cry, but it was unmistakably the sound of pain.

With his eyebrows high and a look of feigned solicitude and surprise, Odinaye looked down at Gray’s left arm. Gray, too, couldn’t resist discovering what was hanging on the other end of her elbow. The flesh was swelling and purpling as they watched. There was a foreign object poking into her arm. It took her a full moment to realize that the object was sticking not in but out—that it was her own bone. All of this was bad enough, but worst of all for the immortal on her knees was the other, that substance, and Gray kept wishing it would rain harder; but the rain could not wash down her arm fast enough to rinse away her bright-red secret winding its watery way in streams to the tip of her elbow and pooling in the crook of her arm.

“Oh my,” said Gray, “look at that.” She tried for a tone of mild, disinterested curiosity; to a surprising extent she succeeded, too. Yet the whites of Odinaye’s eyes loomed large before her, and she was sure now that this man knew her every weakness, her every flaw—that he could see not only that her bones were fragile and her blood red as his, but that she had stolen a roll of Life Savers from a drugstore when she was ten.

“I call help,” said Odinaye, and he was now unabashedly smiling, his teeth sharp, shining in the rain.

“No—” said Gray, but Odinaye was already shouting; four other natives appeared around her. She thought clearly: They are witnesses. Coldly Gray requested a board. Refusing any other assistance, she placed the wood under her arm and stood, carefully holding her limb before her like a roast on a platter. All this while the natives stared, and not so much at her arm as at her face. Gray knew this and gave them a fine performance. Those muscles were a miracle of ordinariness and careless physical comfort. Standing straight as ever, Gray dismissed her parishioners and balanced herself elegantly rung by rung up to Corgie’s cabin. It was a shame Charles missed this ascent—it was one of those moments he would have hated but also admired, the way he felt about most things she did, but maybe for once the admiration might have won out. It was hard, after all, to strike a fine figure covered in black mud, or to look that haughty and regal and unaffected when in the very process of being dethroned.

“I think we’re in trouble,” said Gray from behind Charles.

“Woman,” said Charles, not looking up from his model, “we’ve been in trouble from day one.” He may not have fallen at her feet for returning so soon after such a fight, but for once his woodchips would stay where he put them, and he bound the sticks with dry grass easily and with satisfaction.

“We’re in extra-special trouble today.”

There was a strain to her voice, but after such a scene he’d expect that. “So you came back,” he said, still focused on his monument, “to admit you don’t mind being a goddess. Why don’t we have a drink on it, Kaiser?”

Charles put his knife and grasses down and turned around just as Gray was saying, “Maybe two.” Though her vision was dancing, Gray did succeed in watching Corgie’s face go through a transformation—all its cockiness sloughed off. Gray wondered if she’d ever seen Charles look—serious. “Jesus fucking Christ,” said Charles, reaching immediately for the board on which Gray’s arm was laid, and taking her swiftly to lie on his bed.

Gray kept trying to explain reasonably what had happened and to warn him about Odinaye while Charles cleaned her up, but he kept telling her to shut up, and finally she did. Gray did not protest when Charles took off all her clothes, which were caked with mud and soaked through; he undressed her tenderly, but also with a careful asexual air. She was surprised she didn’t mind lying before him naked. Without embarrassment she let him sponge her clean. He covered her slim, shivering body with a blanket. At last he reached for her left arm, swabbing it delicately. Gray turned her head to the side and pressed her cheek into the pillow.

There seemed to be a commotion building outside.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Charles, pushing her back down.

The sound got more insistent. Waves of discontented murmuring washed through the room.

“You know, Kaiser,” said Corgie softly, brushing the matted hair away from her forehead, “we’re going to have to put that bone of yours back. You might need it someday.”

Gray nodded, and tried to smile. “I had,” she said, “grown rather attached—”

“Shut up,” said Charles fondly.

Outside, there were shouts. For a few bars the crowd struck up a chorus. Its words were unmistakable: “White skin! Red blood!” Il-Ororen shouted. “White skin! Red blood!”

Charles acted as if he heard nothing. “I’m going to get you some honey wine. I’d give my right arm right now—if you’ll forgive the expression—for a good bottle of brandy, but then it would also be nice to have morphine and a hospital and the entire faculty of Yale Medical School. Wine will have to do.” Corgie started out the door, paused, turned back to take his gun. As he walked out of the cabin the crowd grew silent.

“Dugon.” He spoke calmly in Il-Ororen to one of the natives in the front row. “Bring me two jugs of honey wine.”

Dugon looked at the warriors on either side of him and then at the ground. He shifted his weight from foot to foot.

“Dugon,” said Corgie with exaggerated patience, “did you hear me? I meant now.”

“Il-Cor-gie,” said Dugon, not looking Charles in the eye, “is it true about Ol-Kai-zer? That her bones break and her flesh bleeds?”

“Dugon,” said Charles, bearing down on the warrior with those eyes of his that could do their work awfully well when they had to—even if Dugon was already convinced that Charles was a mere mortal, he was discovering it didn’t make much difference. “You changed the subject. We were speaking of wine.”

Yet Dugon was surrounded by warriors who made small motions of discouragement; Dugon looked up at Corgie with an expression of appeal.

Charles let his gun dangle down toward Dugon’s head. “Remember this?” Dugon nodded. “Do you doubt my magic enough to test it? Because whether or not Ol-Kai-zer bleeds may be in question; whether or not you do is not.”

Dugon bolted from the crowd. Corgie watched him go, and waited for his wine serenely, looking down at Il-Ororen as if holding court.

“Odinaye claims Ol-Kai-zer bleeds!” a native braved at last. “Show us the arm of Ol-Kai-zer!”

“Since when,” said Corgie, “do you tell me to do anything?”

Since never. His eyes razed the crowd, rich and dangerous. Il-Ororen went silent, back in church. Corgie stood over them, his eyes rather than his gun poised, aimed at them, cocked, until Dugon ran back with a jug of wine sloshing in each hand. He stopped, breathing hard, and then lifted them reverently to Corgie on his porch. With one final freezing glance, Corgie turned his back on Il-Ororen and returned to Gray.

“Intimidation isn’t going to hold them very long,” said Gray dully from the bed.

“Why not? It’s held them for five years. Now, drink this.” Gray had several sips, then shook her head. “More.” He poured it in her mouth until the wine dribbled down her chin.

“Just like a man,” said Gray, wiping the wine away with her good arm. “Trying to get me drunk.”

“That’s right,” said Charles, “this is what I should have done to you a long time ago.” Charles leaned over and kissed her lightly between the eyes. “Now drink some more.”

“No, Charles, I can’t. It’s just making me sick. Besides, it’s not going to make that much difference and you know it.”

Charles stood up and sighed; Gray realized that he was interested in getting her drunk partly in order to put off resetting her arm. Charles looked down at it, its temporary dressing beginning to show red; his face paled.

“You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?”

“I bluff with them all the time,” said Corgie, gesturing outside. “This …”

“You’re not in your train set anymore.”

Charles looked up and down the length of Gray Kaiser, as if memorizing her hard. “You do seem life-size.”

“Go ahead, Charles.”

It was one thing to shoot a piece of clay in the chest; it was quite another to work the bone back into the skin of a woman who actually existed. Corgie took a long swig of wine.

Corgie picked up her arm and put it down again. Breathed. Tried again. Breathed.

Charles did it. He straightened her arm, and worked that horrible red thing back inside her limb, closing the folds of her flesh over the bone, burying the secret of her mortality back where it belonged. He took one of the sticks from his model monument as a splint and swathed the break with parachute silk. When he was finished, the sweat was pouring down his cheeks as freely as down Gray’s. Breathing heavily, they wiped the moisture from each other’s face.

The chant outside had changed. “Show the arm of Ol-Kaizer!”

“Maybe we should show it to them,” said Charles. “They might be impressed. I did a good job.” And Charles did seem more proud of this achievement than she had ever seen him be of his dominance over Il-Ororen, or even of his precious architecture.

The tone of the gathering outside was angrier now. It sounded like nothing less than a lynch mob. Once in a while a stone hit the side of the cabin.

Gray lay on the bed, trying to keep her mind steady, for she felt she’d need a clear head soon. She was right. Corgie began to clean his gun.

“I’m sorry,” said Gray.

“For what?”

“For that uproar. It’s my fault.”

Corgie stopped oiling his trigger. “It’s not your fault you broke your goddamned arm. I mean, you’re not a god, are you? Isn’t that the whole goddamned problem? I swear, you get into this stuff too deep, you start believing it, and you look down at a cut on your arm and, sure, the natives are surprised you bleed, but the thing is, so are you. Well, we bleed. And it’s hard enough to go around bleeding all over the goddamned place without feeling guilty about it. I mean, for Christ’s sake, Kaiser, doesn’t it hurt?”

Gray shrugged, winced, let her shoulders carefully back down.

Charles went back to cleaning his gun, ramming the rod down its barrel. “I’m telling you,” he continued, thrusting the rod in and out, “you’ve seen too many real, real stupid movies, Kaiser. The old ones, maybe, without any sound. God, give me a woman who screams once in a while. Give me a woman who cries sometimes, and who throws her arms around your goddamned neck and begs for forgiveness—”

“Forgiveness!”

“Woman looks down at a broken arm as if she’s some kind of robot with a few wires cut. Comes in here to be repaired. Practically took out my soldering iron by mistake, Kaiser.”

A rain of stones pattered against the front wall of the cabin.

“Charles,” Gray asked carefully, “have they ever gotten upset like this before?”

“No.” He tried to sound casual.

“Charles,” said Gray, “your airplane doesn’t work, does it?”

Corgie laughed, beautifully. “I’d love to be in that movie of yours, Kaiser. The one where the two of us leave in a cloud of dust and turn into a speck in the sky. That’s a nice ending.”

“You mean it doesn’t,” said Gray heavily.

“Of course, then there’s the helium balloon.”

“What?”

“You know, when I give Odinaye an honorary degree for being so smart—and hell, a purple heart for bravery; the guy’s first-rate, let’s face it—and float off and leave the Emerald City behind.”

“And I click my heels. We’ve made these jokes before.”

“For once in my life I have more important things to think about than new jokes. We’re going to have to make do with the old ones.”

The whole cabin shook. Corgie checked out the window and shot over the head of a man grappling up a stilt; the warrior dropped back to the ground.

“Charles, what if they storm the cabin? Are the two of us just going to pick them off as fast as they come?”

“Us! Since when do you approve of shooting people?”

She looked down. “Since now, maybe.”

“No, Gray,” said Charles sadly. “We might squelch this for a little while, but one rifle is nothing. Here this gun is like a scepter. The kingdom’s falling, Gray, and without a kingdom a scepter is a stick. Now, come here.” She came over to the window wrapped in a blanket; keeping an eye outside, Corgie made her a sling. He told her while he tied the knot, “I’ve always wanted to be in a revolution. I’m just surprised to end up on this side of things is all.” The cabin shook again; Charles turned away from his handiwork with tired irritation, to shoot once more over the head of a would-be visitor and have him drop to the ground. “Show the arm of Ol-Kai-zer!” rang through the room.

“Would it help if I went out to them?” asked Gray.

“They’d run you straight through,” said Charles calmly. “Christ-like, but still not very appealing. Now, go get dressed. Put together a little food and a knife and some water. Pronto.” He gave her a pat on the ass, as if treating himself to a moment of pleasant masculine condescension.

“What for?”

“You’re going on a trip. The back pole is still an exit they don’t know about. The trail is covered in brush all the way to the cliffs, right? Now get going.”

“Then,” she said uncertainly, “I should put together enough food and water for two.”

Charles fired another shot. When he turned around again he looked angry. “Don’t just stand there,” he said in the same tone he used with Il-Ororen. “Move it.”

“But why—”

“Idiot! How are the two of us going to saunter off into the horizon? With the music playing and the sun setting and the credits rolling happily down the screen? Why don’t you use your mind a little when we actually need it? They’re mad at me, Kaiser. Haven’t you noticed? They’re peeved. They’re peeved at you, too, gracious agricultural consultant that you might have been. Our friends have been had, darling. They want in here. No one is sliding down that back pole without someone else at this window with a gun. It may be only a scepter but it still packs a punch. Now pack up and get the hell out of here before it’s too late, and we both end up skewered on the same spear like one big messianic brochette.”

“But, Charles, why don’t I take the gun and you slide down the pole?”

Charles looked at her squarely. “Is that an offer?”

“Yes,” said Gray. She drew her blanket closer around her and looked away from Charles, embarrassed. She didn’t know what she was doing. She’d said yes because it sounded nice. That wasn’t enough.

Charles said nothing until she looked back at him, at a face that was haggard and regretful. It was a face that knew what it was doing. “You couldn’t,” said Charles. “Your arm … Besides, I might be able to talk them out of this. You’d never swing that. You don’t have the clout.”

“But all those Kenyans you’ve shot. If one, why not two … Remember?”

“Your first morning here. You were excellent,” said Charles with satisfaction. “You impressed me enormously that day.”

“But you said there was no limit.”

“And you said there was.” Charles smiled philosophically, glancing out the window to find the natives were getting restless. Once more, though, he did not fire into the crowd but shot off a tree branch over their heads. It crackled and fell, scattering Africans beneath it. Charles turned back to Gray. “Well, touché. You were right.”

“What’s the limit, Charles?”

“You,” he said readily.

“That’s it?”

“Yep. Just you.” The simplicity seemed to please him.

Gray would not understand this for a long time. Already projecting herself into this coming confusion, Gray asked Charles one more thing: “Even if I make it—later, how is this going to make me feel?”

“Alive, for one thing,” said Charles. “Swell. And maybe lousy, too.” Gray still didn’t move, so Charles had to explain patiently, “You’ll feel like you owe somebody something. And you will. Just not me. Pass it on. Give him my regards.” And then Charles looked out the window again, in a pang of jealousy over someone who, as it turns out, was not yet born.

Gray went to her corner, dressed, and packed her knapsack. It must have sickened her to remember to take the rolls of film, the tapes, all her notes—to even now be planning on cashing in on her “study” should she succeed in returning home. It would have been a relief then, when Corgie instructed her from the window, “Don’t forget those notes of yours, Kaiser. You write all this up and you get this published, understand? I want to be immortal somehow.”

When she finished packing, Charles carefully threaded the strap of her knapsack around the sling. A spear flew through the window and lodged in Corgie’s mattress. They did not make a joke about it. Gray looked at the spear, deep in the bed. Feathers from the hole floated up through the air and caught in Gray’s hair. Corgie picked them out one by one. All the sourness was gone from his face, the vengeful glimmer. There were a lot of things to say, but it was too late for all of them, so the two kept quiet and stones rattled against the door and Charles Corgie kissed Gray Kaiser, ol-murani, goodbye.

In the oddest way, Gray did not quite enjoy it. It was, simply, not the kiss of two people who had loved each other hard and had to part. It was the kiss of two people who had fought each other up until the very last minute. It was a reminder, in its unfamiliarity, of what they had not been doing.

Charles helped her down the pole from above. That hand extended, keeping her poised above the ground for a moment before it let go—the long, tired tendons, the skin still dark and oily from cleaning his gun—was the last she saw of him. Silently she crept through the brushy pathway to the forest, making her way to the trail she’d followed down the cliffs on the way here. Deftly, dutifully, quietly, she hiked the narrow switchbacks, while behind her the rhythm of Corgie’s rifle increased steadily, like a final salute. Yet soon after she started up the mountain, the firing stopped altogether. Gray decided she was too high to hear anymore. Later, when she could no longer see into the valley, she was sure she heard an explosion she couldn’t explain.

While the pain in her arm was keen, Gray was grateful for its steady distraction. It was despite the wound rather than because of it that Il-Ororen might have made out down her cheeks the tears which far more than blood proved her a human being.

The trip back was grueling work, and Gray bore down on it. She slept poorly, with the snarl of cheetahs at the edge of her ear. Gray told Errol later that those days on the trail she was as close to being “an animal” as she’d ever come, in a compulsive, dead migration to the rest of her herd. The body persevered. The mind went numb, speaking only to say: Don’t step there; avoid those ants; this branch is in your way.

She did make it to Hassatti’s tribe. Though in a fever, she refused to rest more than a couple of hours and insisted on being taken to Nairobi right away. She wouldn’t talk about what had happened, and made the bumpy trip in a pickup truck in silence. When she reached the city, she hired a man to take her in a small prop plane over the peaks of Kilimanjaro.

During most of this trip, too, she didn’t speak, nor did she explain her purpose. She gave her pilot directions until she recognized the deep valley surrounded by the plunging cliffs she’d stared up at so often from the hammock on Corgie’s veranda. She told the pilot to fly closer; circling, the plane drew lower. Trees obscured the muddy huts, but Gray was not looking for traditional architecture.

“Wait,” she said, “this might not be the place.” Gray scanned back and forth across the valley. “Closer.”

The plane swept lower, and Gray wondered how Il-Ororen must feel, seeing another god fly by—were they ready for their next messiah? No, surely they’d made do with the old one. Charles was such a resourceful man, he had that way of talking to them—and they’d always listened to him in the end, always. Well, they enjoyed him, didn’t they? He was a fun god. Most certainly he’d pulled something. And wouldn’t Charles be surprised when they landed roughly between banana trees and Gray Kaiser stepped out of the cockpit, smiling, finally able to kiss him and take him up in the sky with the credits rolling?

Gray’s eyes darted across the familiar valley, panicked. “This can’t be right,” she said. “Maybe these valleys look a lot the same, I don’t know …”

There was no tower. There was no treehouse, no gym, no cathedral. The plane flew closer in, at Gray’s insistence, to the pilot’s distress, until, there—she got her bearings. Gray fell back in her seat.

“Msabu wish to land? There is not space—”

“No,” said Gray. “Take it back up. Take me to Nairobi.”

“If Msabu wish to more look—”

“No,” said Gray. “I’ve seen enough.”

The small plane soared back up, its passengers’ ears popping. Below, the long, narrow valley grew smaller, but Gray couldn’t help but see even as the plane rose quite high the four black scars of charred flat earth and a few wisps of smoke trailing from these patches, like the last sad smoldering of crematory ash.